MARCO SCUTARO THE HITTER. Marco Scutaro is the second baseman who was injured. Before the baseball season began in 2009, I posted here about “The Importance of Marco Scutaro”. The post was about how some baseball teams were recognizing the importance of defense. I chose Marco Scutaro as an example because he was an excellent defensive player who had never been considered a good hitter (“good field, no hit”). He had finally gotten 500 at bats in the majors for the first time at the age of 32. He has been a regular for the four following seasons. This year, at the age of 36, he was traded to the Giants in midseason and hit 362 with an OPS of 859 for the last half of the year to spark the Giants to a pennant (Scutaro’s statistics are here).
As this wikipedia article describes, Marco Polo is “a form of tag played in a swimming pool”. Apparently Giants fans now have a cheer where one section of the stands calls “Marco” and another section answers “Scutaro”.
I’m currently reading Nate Silver’s new book, “The Signal and the Noise” which is about forecasting, making predictions, and some of the psychological problems people have about them.
For example, that people who love stats about baseball often dismiss things that cannot be easily quantified – such as defense. Some of Billy Beane’s A’s teams just shoved DH-style players into the outfield and Beane found out a few years later that it may have cost them anywhere from 5-10 wins a season. The A’s of the past few years have been significantly better defensively.